Category: Enterprise Apps

Google has been pushing Google Apps for the Enterprise for some time and, more and more, going head-to-head against Microsoft and IBM. Security and Privacy have again gotten in Google’s way as it works to beef up revenue streams other than contextual advertising. The latest concerns have been expressed by UC Davis:

In a potential blow to Google’s efforts to establish itself as a major player in enterprise software, a leading public university has ended its evaluation of Gmail as the official e-mail program for its 30,000 faculty and staff members—and it’s got some harsh words for the search giant.
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the note, dated April 30, also cited a recent letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt from the privacy commissioners of ten countries, including Canada, the UK, and Germany—but not the U.S.—that chastised Google for its recent addition of Google Buzz to Gmail. Google Buzz adds social networking tools that the commissioners said compromise user privacy.

This is an interesting contrast to the recent funding Cloud Sherpas raised:

Cloud Sherpas not only helps companies migrate and transition over to Google Apps but also provides additional tools to make the productivity suite more useful … recently launched Sherpa Tools, which adds more IT management functionality to Google Apps.

Google Apps has basically been a total win for the start-up I’ve been helping build since August ’08: basically within a week of coming aboard, I had all the collaboration tools (mail, calendar and docs) running in our own “private space.” Precisely these kinds of systems have taken me weeks or months to build atop Exchange or Lotus Notes. This without a single dollar of CapEx or person-power needed to buy or admin boxes.

The privacy issues may be of concern to some orgs, but it would be surprising if there were issues that Google and their partners like Cloud Sherpa couldn’t address. Regardless, if you’re interested in speed-to-market with very few out-of-pocket costs, and by “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good,” there are many benefits to be had for many orgs by rolling out Google Apps over Exchange and Lotus Notes.photo credit: Caneles

Injecting new thinking into existing organizations, from within the organization itself, is difficult. Even when the need for “thinking different” is plain, entrenchment – of process, people, expectation – make diverging from set paths a chore. One entrepreneurial speaker is seeing an encouraging trend:

Eric Ries, the driving force behind the “lean startup” movement, which encourages high efficiency and meticulous metrics tracking within entrepreneurial ventures. Ries … noticed a trend among some of the people attending his talks. Many managers from large companies were coming to his sessions to learn what they could, because, as Ries discovered, the principals of lean startups can exist within larger corporations that are attempting to innovate.

Efficiency and metrics tracking – and you can’t achieve one without the other – shouldn’t be solely the realm of the entrepreneur – they’re core to any successful business.

“The real value is [this] starts to catalyze change because by changing the way you work you start to accelerate that feedback loop […] and that can become the basis for making other changes,” Ries says.
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Companies could also benefit … by inspiring their existing employees to be innovative, instead of wrangling up entrepreneurs from a startup, which would save them money in the end.

photo credit: westparkPaving the way for New Thinking helpsNew ideas presented from within an organization can be met with derision, resentment and the entrenchment mentioned above – the reason there’s a consulting industry generally isn’t because organizations don’t have the talent and ideas aboard already. In my experience, those things usually *are* there. The reason outsiders are brought in is to help those ideas get a foothold and succeed.

It’s almost unfortunate, but many times outsiders are brought in because insiders haven’t gotten it done. It’s not that they weren’t capable; it’s that they didn’t. Without assistance, there’s little to reason to believe this will change. So “fresh eyes” come in to help. Those new perspectives can be brought in even from other parts of the larger organization – the point of the exercise is to make time to think specifically about what your processes are, why they are that way, and what the team can do to improve them.

(Management) “have this idea that a certain alchemy will happen that ‘if I bring these special people into my organization, they will teach my regular people how to be special,’ and that’s just a formula for breeding resentment,” Ries told ReadWriteWeb. “If the people doing the acquiring had more of a theory about how entrepreneurship is supposed to work […] they could start to think of better ways to plug an acquired company into the larger organization, taking advantage of what they’re good at without destroying it.”

The bit about alchemy is mostly true – especially when a larger organization works to consume a smaller, more entrepreneurial organization in whole, it can create a lot of friction without creating the intended value: The good ideas both sides bring are lost to disdain.

Encouraging efficiency and the importance of metrics – “data-driven decision-making” – would improve chances of an organization actually synthesizing what an acquired team had to offer. Putting a framework around how existing team members can be innovative within the organization would make any injection of new ideas that much more welcomed and effective. Then the “fresh eyes” have their best shot at ensuring everyone’s successful.